coco floppy controller cartrage

TRS-80 COCO HARD DRIVE SPECIALISTS FLOPPY CONTROLLER AND CABLE





So I just won this on ebay.
It's coming from America (I'm in England) and am hoping to use this with my coco 2.
I figure there won't be any compatibility issues with it being American and my coco being UK?
What disk drives will it work with and would it be possible to connect a harddrive?

Thanks dudes.

I saw that one on eBay and was curious about it. It looks like it uses Tandy's plastic housing, yet it has somebody else's label on it. I doubt that it will connect to a hard drive. The cable looks like a regular 5.25" floppy drive cable. I wonder what DOS it has in ROM? If it's not a standard RSDOS ROM, then maybe it'll offer 40 track and/or double-sided support like the J&M controllers did.

Looking forward to seeing what it can do myself.
are all 5.25 standard then?

Well, they are standard-ish, though there are several varieties such as single/double sided, single/double/high density, 40/80 tracks (or more accurately, 48/96 tracks per inch), etc.

A normal CoCo drive is single sided, double density, with 48 tracks per inch. Most of these drives are called "40 track", but the normal RSDOS ROM only uses 35 of them. Most of the original Tandy drives are 40 track drives, but it's not guaranteed; one of my Tandy drives can only step to track 39, while the other can step to track 41.

A double-sided drive should work, but normal RS-DOS will not use the second side. Some aftermarket ROMs like the ones in the J&M controllers could support up to 40 tracks, and could use both sides. Regular RSDOS ROMs can't understand the 40 track or double sided disks.

Drives that probably will work with a CoCo controller will often be described as "SS DD", "DS DD", "360K", etc.

There is a third-party enhancement to Disk Extended BASIC that I can't recommend too highly. It's called ADOS.

ftp://maltedmedia.com/coco/SOFTWARE/OS/ADOS/

It will let you access 40 tracks, and both sides of a Double Sided drive among many other things.

Art Flexser has released it as Freeware.

This turned up today.Plugged it in and:



It seems to work.
Haven't attached a drive to it yet.
I have a standard PC 3 1/2 inch drive and a 5 1/4 from a BBC micro and am wondering which one is best to try.
The BBC drive has the same edge connecter without a notch but I'm not sure it's compatible and the PC drive has a notch where the coco disk adapter doesn't so In both cases I'm unsure of the orientation.

Here's a pic of it's internals for those who are interested.



UPDATE:
Couldn't wait.Tried it with the PC 3 1/2" drive but no go.Then tried the BBC drive and it seemed to work.
DIR would spin the drive but give an I/O error (disk was not formatted at this point).Tried DSKINI 1,drive spun but no head activity and I/O error again.
Finally figured out it was seeing the drive as 2 not 1 so DRVINI 2 worked.saved a simple basic program and loaded it again.:DYAY:D

NOW:what's the easiest method to getting coco games on a PC onto a disk formatted for the coco?Can I plug the BBC drive into my PC and somehow transfer the files in windows?

That's a good Controller. It will support two ROM chips.

Here's a link to the ADOS manual: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com...s/Operating Systems/ADOS (SpectroSystems).pdf

This site is a great archive of Coco software: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/

Also, I recommend Drivewire. You can use a PC as a disk server, and easily get all the software disk images from the Coco archive to your Coco.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~mmarlette/Cloud-9/Software/DriveWire3.html

Subscribe to the Coco mailing list at: http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


I would use a 5.25" drive. Make sure you use a straight-through cable. Observe pin one. And, make sure you jumper the first drive as DS0, second as DS1, and so on...

With the ADOS manual, you can make the 3.5" work as a low density 720k drive. But, you'd have to POKE the changed parameters at each boot. A 5.25" Drive will just work.

Let me know if I can help you in any way.

Thanks for all that info.Especially the ADOS manual-saved me a lot of searching.
Just checked and I have the parts to build me a serial cable so I'll give the drivewire a go.

Made a serial cable and finally got it working with drivewire but only when my floppy cartridge is unplugged.DOH!Looks like the hdb-dos is messing with the cartridge and they refuse to work together.Looking for another method of using the serial cable-hopefully there's something like adt-pro that I use with the apple II.

What I would do is put a straight Disk Extended BASIC ROM or an HDB-DOS ROM (even better) into the disk controller.

I'm going to burn one for myself in the next few days.

If only you lived a bit closer.
You said it would support 2 roms-is that what the empty slot is for(although I notice its 24 pin instead of 28)?
I figure if I'm going to do this I need a 28 pin 8kb eprom,burn it and then replace the chip with the silver covering with the new one?

Yes. If you're going to go through all that trouble, burn an HDB-DOS EPROM from the drivewire.zip file. Then, you'll have disk and Drivewire access from boot-time.

FINALLY!
Managed to copy a .dsk file to floppy and run it on my coco.
After messing some more with drivewire and HDB-DOS I thought maybe because the ados is messing with the hdb-dos that I'm downloading to my coco would it work if I removed the EPROM containing the ados from my floppy controller.turns out it does.Drivewire is now working with my floppy controller.Copied a .dsk image to my floppy drive,Put the eprom back in,booted the game and got playing.
Would be nice if I could figure out how to disable the eprom without unplugging it-will have a good search of the net to see if those jumpers on my floppy cartridge will do anything.

Thanks for all you help.
If I can't either sort out an eprom with hdb-dos on it or a simple way to disable the ados eprom I'll just have to do a big batch of copying so I won't have to keep pulling chips from my floppy cartridge.


EDIT:looks like the ados 'DISABLE' command does the job.When I type it in I can still use the floppy but hdb-dos seems to work as well without removing the eprom.
Found this out after I just ordered an eprom,eprom programmer and a eraser so I will still be making my own hdb-dos rom.

One other thing I've noticed.Any disk formatted with ados appears on drive 2 but disks make with hds-dos are drive 0.I thought he drive number was set in the hardware?

The way ADOS works with double sided drives is that 0 and 1 are the front side of the drive. 2 and 3 are the back side of 0 and 1. Somehow, you are formatting the wrong side of the disks, or your disk cable is wrong.

You should have a straight through cable, with no twists. Normally, a TRS-80 Cable pulls all the pins except the select for one disk drive.

The easiest thing to do is use a straight through cable with no twists or pulled pins, and set the drive select on each floppy drive. Remove the terminating resistor on all drives except drive 0, and put that last on the chain. That will work for 3 double sided drives, or 4 single sided drives.